$19.95/Cap
"When you hear the truth about BJ&B, you realize why your school
has to help stop sweatshops."

69¢
an hour"What
I want to know is why do we get paid so little, if these caps sell
for so much? I'm working 56 hours a week, and sometimes I can't afford
clothes for my children."

A
UNITE Report on Campus Caps made by
BJ&B in the Dominican Republic

Dear student,

We were as shocked as you to
find out that baseball caps with our schools' logos were made
in a sweatshop.

What is even more shocking
is that we don't know where all the other caps, T-shirts and sweatshirts
with our schools' logos were made. We don't know if they were
produced under decent conditions or in a horrible sweatshop.

But you can help make a change.

Here's what Georgetown student
Mike Burns told their student newspaper: "The Georgetown logo
that is manufactured so prevalently represents all of us: students,
faculty, staff, administrators, and alumni. We have a responsibility
to know how this apparel is made."

We want to know where our college
logo apparel is produced and that it is produced under decent
conditions.

Students across the country
are standing up and demanding that their universities take responsibility
for their college apparel. We invite you to join us in working
to stop sweatshops!

Michael BurnsGeorgetown '98

Moran Beasley
Eastern Illinois '99

Laura McSpedon
Georgetown '00

Lori Kreloff
Illinois '99

Danny Massey
Brown '98

Daniel Hennefeld
Harvard '99

Suzanne Clark
Brown '99

Derek Dorn
Cornell '98

Price
of a Cap
$19.95

Outside of Santo Domingo in the Dominican town of Villa
Altagracia, 2,050 workers, mostly teenage girls or young women, make
baseball caps bearing the names of America's great universities. Workers
say that in a typical week at BJ&B they earn approximately $40 after
56 hours of work.

Thousands of miles away, students, families, alumni and
sports fans buy these caps at campus stores at Harvard, Rutgers, Georgetown,
Cornell, Duke and other universities. They pay about $20 for a cap.
The University makes about $1.50 from each cap from a licensing fee.
Of that price, only 8¢ goes to the workers who made the cap.

Members of these university communities don't know about
the workers in Villa Altagracia. And the Dominican workers don't know
much about the universities whose logos they embroider onto caps. However,
in April, 1998, workers from the BJ&B plant are visiting the United
States to meet with members of some of these university communities.
They will meet with student groups who are calling for policies governing
university licensing that assure that the goods bearing the university's
name are made under decent working conditions. Their visit has been
facilitated by the Dominican labor union that is struggling to win improvements
in the lives of workers at plants such as BJ&B. But the workers
who are visiting may be taking great personal risks - including the
possibility of being blacklisted from other jobs once they return.

People work at BJ&B to try to build a life for their
families. But BJ&B's policies will likely result in workers staying
hungry, poorly housed and poorly clothed. Part of the problem is the
low pay level. The pay is 1/3 of what the Dominican government says
is sufficient for a typical family. Worse, BJ&B's policies keep
workers from being able to improve their lives. The company forces overtime
work, often requiring 56 hours of work per week in violation of Dominican
law. This policy forces many of the young people who take evening classes
to give up their education in order to keep their jobs. BJ&B's policy
has been to pay women less than men, in violation of Dominican law.
And BJ&B employees complain that the company recently terminated
its entire workforce to avoid the legally required pay and benefit increases
that come after one year's work. BJ&B then rehired workers as entry
level employees. Union leaders report that this evasion of the law is
typical of sweatshop companies in the Dominican Republic.

What
the Workers Get
8¢

Conditions inside the BJ&B plant are disturbing. Workers
report that managers hit workers to discipline them, and touch women
inappropriately; that managers shout at and belittle workers; that the
drinking water causes disease; and that the company's safety practices
are poor. Some workers injured on the job have been fired.

And when workers disgusted with these practices try to
do something about it, the company's action is swift and decisive. Last
time a group of workers began to talk about forming a union, the company
conducted mass firings of suspected union sympathizers. Workers report
that the company fired people just because they lived in a village where
some of the union activists came from.

By any reasonable person's definition, BJ&B is a sweatshop.
But the good news is that the new relationship between these workers
and concerned members of the university community gives some reasons
for hope. Sweatshops proliferate when they are hidden. Worker mistreatment
takes place when an uncaring boss thinks nobody is looking. Impoverished
communities are exploited when greed gets disguised as good business
practices.

In March of 1998, Duke University courageously adopted
the first licensing code that might make a difference to workers at
BJ&B and similar factories. Duke will require that companies licensing
Duke's name ensure fair treatment of workers. And Duke requires that
much of the information about where products are made be available to
the public, so that sweatshop conditions cannot remain hidden. The Duke
policy expresses a preference for companies taking leadership in the
area of workplace conditions, so that companies that pay enough to bring
workers out of poverty can be rewarded for their responsible conduct.

The Duke action took courage on the part of the administration,
and on the part of the students who raised this issue. The visit of
BJ&B workers to the U.S. to tell their story requires even more
courage. But they are here in the hope that their story will motivate
more universities to join Duke in adopting licensing policies that demand
accountability from the producers of licensed apparel. This report is
the story of the workers at BJ&B.

At
BJ&B caps are big business

If
you wander across a college campus, you are likely to find a bookstore
or university shop that sells smart-looking baseball caps bearing the
name or logo of the university. Chances are that cap was manufactured
in the Dominican Republic. It was very likely made at BJ&B.

BJ&B is a seven-plant complex that employs over 2,000
workers. BJ&B is a major producer of baseball-style caps bearing
the insignia of universities, professional sports teams, and name brands.
U.S. athletic apparel companies such as Champion and Starter supply
BJ&B with much of the university insignia work.

BJ&B is big business. BJ&B, along with Mocarea,
another Dominican plant, is the primary manufacturing center for one
of the largest cap producers in the world. Yupoong, the parent company
of BJ&B, says that it makes 14.4 million baseball caps per year
in the Dominican Republic.

BJ&B
makes caps with the following logos:

Universities

Professional
Sports

National
Brands

Cornell

U. of Florida

Major League Baseball

Champion

Maxfli

Duke

U. of Michigan

National Hockey League

Disney

Nike

Georgetown

U of N.Carolina

National Basketball Assoc.

Fila

Nutmeg

Harvard

UCLA

National Football League

GAP

Starter

Notre Dame

USC

Zap

Who
Benefits?

Who
makes money from this flow of economic activity?Not the workers who make the product, and to a large extent,
not the economy of the Dominican Republic.

The
university benefits.In the university shop, you can pay $15 to $22 for a cap made
at BJ&B, but the typical cost is $19.95. The university collects
a licensing fee - typically 7.5% of the retail price, and sometimes
over 10%. So the university collects about $1.50 or more from your purchase
of a cap made at BJ&B.

But
only 8¢ of the purchase price goes to pay the workers who made the cap.1
The university gets about 20 times more than the workers from the sale
of each cap!

Retail
Price: $19.95

Workers
get 8¢

University Gets $1.50 or More

Foreign
ownership. If the workers are only paid 8¢ of the $19.95
price, do the profits at BJ&B at least stay in the community? BJ&B
is owned by Yupoong, which is a privately-held Korean company. Based
on Yupoong's sales and production information, we estimate that Yupoong
sells the cap to their immediate customers - companies like Starter
or Champion Ð for about $4.50. This is consistent with what people in
the industry say imported embroidered caps cost at wholesale. If you
take 8¢ direct labor costs out of $4.50, that leaves a lot of room for
materials, management, shipping, depreciation, miscellaneous costs...and
profit. But the profit made at BJ&B doesn't stay to help the Dominican
economy. It goes to its parent company, Yupoong in Korea.

Tax
Breaks.If profits don't stay in the Dominican Republic, does the local
economy benefit from taxes paid by the company? BJ&B is located
in an industrial free trade zone - Zona Franca de Villa Altagracia.
Government literature states that companies such as BJ&B are exempted
from paying import fees and income taxes in free trade zones.

What
8¢ Means To BJ&B Workers

Most
workers live in small, run-down houses made of corrugated iron
or wood. Often there is no indoor plumbing, and a family of five
typically occupies a 2 or 3 room house.

"Even
with a dozen hours of overtime, she only makes about $40, she said.
When I asked her if that was enough for her to live on, she laughed.
'Not even half,' she said through an interpreter."-Bob
Herbert, "Sweatshop U." in New York Times, April 12, 1998

Most workers living on a BJ&B paycheck are living
in poverty.

The impoverished conditions are immediately visible in
Villa Altagracia. Families of 5 or more people, and sometimes whole
extended families, live in crowded and often ramshackle housing. It
is common for 5 family members to sleep in the same room. The contrast
could not be sharper between the run-down housing of BJ&B's workers
and the modern plant with its millions of dollars of hi-tech embroidery
machines.

Long
hours and little pay.The base pay for a typical worker for a full 44-hour work-week
amounts to $30.54, or 69¢ per hour.2 This
is only 1/3 of what the Dominican government estimates to be the necessary
income for a typical family to meet its basic needs.3This means that BJ&B workers could afford to meet these basic
needs if they got paid an extra 16¢ for every $19.95 cap they make.

A worker can earn an estimated $43.22 for the week by
putting in a 56-hour week, and earning a $3.42 bonus for perfect on-time
attendance, meeting production quota, and not getting on the bad side
of the supervisor.4 Said one 18-year old-worker, "If the supervisor
doesn't like you, you'll never get your bonus."

As the table below shows, survival is a struggle on a
BJ&B wage. There is a sad irony to the poverty wages paid at BJ&B.
Where BJ&B now stands, workers say there once stood a unionized
sugar mill that paid higher wages. Now this giant cap-maker dominates
the Villa Altagracia free trade zone. The development of BJ&B has
not brought economic progress to the struggling community of Villa Altagracia.

Trying To Make Ends MeetOne 23-year-old mother told us how she spends her
daily $7.72 wage:

Rent

...............

1.84

Lunch from Free Trade Zone vendors

...............

1.40

Transportation

...............

0.70

Child care

...............

1.08

Milk & cereal (for infant)

...............

0.44
_____

$5.46

That leaves $2.26 for the rest of her family's food, water,
electricity, clothes, school costs, personal care products and
medicine. She has worked at BJ&B for two years.

1 How do we know this 8¢ figure?
We know the wage level, and we can estimate how much time is spent making
each cap. We have two sources to estimate labor time, which are consistent
with each other. One is the number of caps workers say each work unit
produces per day. The other is the amount of labor per cap in other
embroidered baseball cap plants.

2 Take-home pay is lower, because
of a legally required deduction of about 2.5% for social security (public
health care).